Sunday, 15 February 2015

UK POLLING REPORT UNIFORM SWING PROJECTION #GE2015

244

313

18

57

18

Hung Parliament. Labour short by 13

The standard method of translating shares of the vote into seats is to
use a uniform swing calculation. This means that the national change in
vote share for each party is applied to each individual seat to see how
that would effect the result, and then these theoretical results in each
seat are totted up to produce a projection for House of Commons.
This is a crude measure and can result in some illogical and
impossible projections – for example, if a poll showed Labour support
dropping by 13%, as one poll did during Summer 2008, then a uniform
swing calculation using those figures would project Labour getting less
than zero votes in 48 seats. This is clearly nonsense. Such projections
also ignore any regional variations, tactical considerations or
variations due to incumbency effects of new MPs or MPs standing down.
Despite all these drawbacks, it normally does a reasonably good job and,
given that it is a straight extrapolation of current voting figures it
is at least accepted as a fair projection that is not at the whim of
individual guesswork or assumptions.

UPDATE: Even with all the caveats above, the rise of the SNP in
Scotland meant that a plain UNS projection was starting to look really
quite absurd. From February 2015 I’ve moved slightly from straight UNS –
instead there is UNS in Scotland, and UNS in the rest of Great Britain.
The Scottish UNS is based on an average of recent Scottish polls, the
figures for the rest of the country are based on the average of GB
polls, but adjusted to account for Scotland.For the avoidance of doubt, this is NOT my prediction
of what will happen at the election. It is a uniform swing projection
based on the current average of the polls – it doesn’t take account of
how the polls might change before may, or things like incumbency,
by-elections or constituency polling. It is not what I expect to
actually happen in May.

UK GENERAL ELECTION 2015 SEATS WON

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